Almanac of American Politics Profile

Arkansas has voted for the winners of the last nine presidential elections. It voted 53 percent for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 54 percent in 1996, his best and eighth-best percentages those years. In 2000, it voted only 46 percent for Al Gore, his 29th-best state, and in 2004, only 44 percent for John Kerry, his 33d best. George W. Bush won 51 percent here in 2000, his lowest percentage in the South except of course for Florida; he won 54 percent in 2004. For a brief moment in mid-October of 2004, polls showed a tight race here. Bush already had headquarters across the state and ran radio ads, while Kerry and the Democrats went on TV and Bill Clinton returned to the state on Halloween. But Bush, who narrowly lost two of Arkansas’s congressional districts in 2000, carried all four in 2004. Looking ahead to 2008, Arkansas seems like the southern state most likely to fall into the Democratic column. SurveyUSA’s 50-state polling in 2006 showed that Hillary Rodham Clinton, even though she left Arkansas behind and ran for the Senate instead in New York, leading Rudolph W. Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Arkansas’s own Mike Huckabee in the state.

The Arkansas presidential primary, usually held in May, attracts little attention. So the legislature voted in 2005 to move it to the first Tuesday in February in an effort to give the state a more significant voice in the nominating process. In 2006, Arkansas sought the national Democratic party’s sanction to hold an early primary, right after New Hampshire. But the Democratic National Committee awarded that plum to South Carolina, which has a much higher percentage of African Americans, instead. Arkansas Republicans were not averse to holding an early primary, although with native son Huckabee in the race it might not have attracted many competitors.